The History of Love

Octogenarian New Yorker Leo Gursky's whole life has been motivated by survival, by his love for a woman he lost in World War II Poland, and by the son he could not acknowledge as his own. He also lost the manuscript for the book he wrote, The History of Love, back in Poland, never knowing another man found it and published it as his own in Chile. Then Alma Singer, a teenager in New York who was named for the heroine of that book, one day decides she can only help her fractured little family if she tracks down the mysterious author.

"The History of Love is one of those spider-web books that reviewers unintentionally tear to pieces in the act of clearing a path for readers.... Beware helpful explanations: No one must rob you of the chance to experience Nicole Krauss's [2005] novel in all its beautiful confusion.... Though it's a relatively short book (some pages contain only a sentence or two), The History of Love involves several narrators and moves back and forth through the 20th century and around the world. But that's just for starters: It contains a lost, stolen, destroyed, found, translated and retranslated book called 'The History of Love,' characters named for other characters, cases of plagiarism and mistaken identity, and several crucial coincidences and chance meetings that are all maddeningly scrambled in an elliptical novel that shouldn't work but does."—Washington Post Book World